I love seeing this kind of stuff. I suppose most people who are really into animation would agree that seeing the nuts and bolts only add up to the magic. Sketches and layouts provide a lot of insight on how the artist's minds work.

Okay, so we need to find a code freak who draws loves cartoons and who can build a program that combines best elements of Mirage and Flash. Might as well make it a free or an open source project because changes and improvements can be done immediately or at least in more timely manner by the coding community. Any (open source) programmers up to the challenge?

Old, old post , and I don't know if you even read comments on an old post like this , but I was Googling around for references to Mirage and found this where you wrote:

"So far, I've found that Mirage is better for drawing, but its timeline and other tools are useless."

If you still own a license of Mirage you may be interested to know that TVPaint Development Co. is currently running a special 60% discount to upgrade to TVP PRO from Mirage . Email them at info@tvpaint.com to get the details on the special price upgrade if you're interested.

I also like the drawing tools in Mirage (way better than Flash) , but if you hadn't heard Mirage has been improved significantly over the last couple of years by the software developers TVPaint Development Co. , who were the programmers who originally wrote the program Mirage. The ownership of the program has reverted to TVPaint Development Co. and they have released several updated versions of the software, now called TVP Animation PRO , with a much better timeline and other tools (it even has the option for a traditional style vertical X-sheet instead of a timeline , but I actually like the horizontal timeline better than TVP's X-sheet.)

Same great drawings tools as in Mirage, but improved interface, timeline and it has a cool rotating drawing area , a "virtual animation disc" which turns the drawing just like on a real animation disc.

You might want to try it and see the improvements to the interface (which is still more complicated than it needs to be in my opinion, but can be customized now with custom user configurations to make the interface more streamlined if you don't always need to use all the bells and whistles.